Crack it, Doc...one more time

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, pseudoscience, chiropractic

Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". This phrase came to mind soon after I began reading One Minute Wellness: the natural health & happiness system that never fails by Dr. Ben Lerner with Dr. Greg Loman. I also found myself thinking, "I sure wish these guys were right."

The book is a long apologetic for Chiropractic, of a specific type. Drs. Lerner and Loman are not your grandfather's Chiropractors...or perhaps they'd say that only they and their ilk really are. They write more about God than about medicine. Thus, the book is really a presentation of faith healing, and all the more so as they claim the practice of "Body by God" Chiropractic has facilitated the healing of asthma, colic, arthritis, chronic ear infections, and bipolar disorder. They also write much about nutrition, contrasting "Food by God" with "Food by Man".

Chiropractic is a useful medical discipline. Its semi-allopathic cousin Osteopathy equally so. I learned an exercise from an Osteopath that I periodically need to combat sciatica. It works fast, and it works well. Many of my family members and friends see a Chiropractor from time to time. All of us also take advantage of allopathic ("ordinary") medicine as needed. I'd never have gone to a Chiropractor to either detect or treat colon cancer (my 2000-2001 "inner space" odyssey). However, one of my brothers did use a Chiropractor who practices Kinesiology to check for colon polyps. He claims there are none, but I'm frankly skeptical. Nothing substitutes seeing for yourself, via a colonoscopy.

A word about subluxations. Luxation is a synonym of dislocation. Sub-Luxation, or subluxation, is a displacement of a joint that is less than a dislocation, but is not quite normal. A genuine subluxation is painful, but not as agonizing as a luxation. A slightly jammed finger from catching a basketball wrongly is a common sort of subluxation; a harder jam, a dislocation, usually requires medical treatment. A genuine subluxation in the spine is also painful. If it doesn't hurt, it's not out of place. If you have a sore neck from reading too long with your head too far forward, a Chiropractor can probably help you. However, it has been repeatedly shown that the "silent" subluxations most Chiropractors point out on X-rays are imaginary, and different practitioners reading the same X-ray point out different "subluxations". Remember, if it doesn't hurt, it's not out of place.

It's also well known that better nutrition supports better health. But I find myself puzzled by the lists in Appendix B, "Food by God, Food by Man" (FbG, FbM). I'll just pick an item or two in my idiosyncratic way.

First, the only sweetener on the FbG list is Honey. Yet a vegetable on the same list is the Beet. If I puree a boiled Beet and filter it, I can crystallize sugar (sucrose) from the juice, sugar that is chemically identical to the sugar you buy in 5# bags at the store. As a matter of fact, those bags are full of sugar from "sugar beets", a variety that has a much higher sugar content than the ordinary red beet. Does my "processing" of the beet somehow make the sucrose molecule into a poison? Half the sugar content of honey is also sucrose, and the other half is fructose, which you can crystallize from grape juice (Grapes are also FbG).

People get so bothered by "refined" sugar or salt (also on the FbM list). What refining? Just crystallizing a couple of times to remove contaminants. Do you prefer "sea salt" to refined salt? Be prepared for your daily dose of mercury, cadmium, and other things that refining removes. Actually, salt crystallized from filtered sea water (gotta filter out the bacteria and parasites...) contains enough sulfate and magnesium ions to act as a mild laxative, which makes it an annoyance if your bowel is already producing a healthy movement or two daily! Such salt also sticks together and won't pour because those same extra ions absorb water from the air, making true sea salt perpetually moist.

For another, the FbM list contains the item "Regular use of animal products". (Creeping vegetarianism alert!) Just what is "regular"? If I eat chicken, pork or beef once a week only, is that FbG, but twice or more makes it FbM? This is nonsense! And why call Shellfish FbM? Did Man create shrimp ex nihilo? How about crabs, mussels, or octopi (great as sushi!).

Apparently, cooking food is OK; it must not be a process that turns FbG into FbM, the way recrystallizing sugar or salt does. Oh, Oh! I just found Butter Buds on the FbG list!! Isn't that processed fat? Yet it's actually advertized as fat free. At www.bbuds.com, we read,

"Butter Buds Food Ingredients uses proprietary enzyme modification technology to 'unlock' the hidden, potent flavor in butter, cream, cheese and other flavorful fats, delivering highly concentrated flavor in convenient powdered form. These natural dairy concentrates deliver up to 400 times the flavor strength of standard dairy ingredients, and are used at extremely low application levels (usually less than 1.0%)."

I don't know about you, but modifying various fats using enzymes is "processing" of a rather extreme type. There is no way this could be "by God". I don't know what god these folks are invoking, but this process removes 99% of what God puts into natural fat.

So, let's come to God. Dr. B. J. Palmer, the "father of Chiropractic," said a century or so ago, "If God thought we needed aspirin, He would have created an aspirin tree." As a matter of fact, God did just that; He created the Willow. If you chew a mouthful of the bark from smooth willow branches, you'll get a dose of salicylic acid (named for salix, the Latin word for willow). Your pain will be relieved, but you'll also get a stomach ache. About the time Dr. Palmer did his first spinal adjustment, a chemist named Gerhardt buffered salicylic acid with sodium acetate (salt plus vinegar) to produce the chemical we call Aspirin today; this is much easier on the stomach, and is equally good as a pain reliever. God's original product causes a lot more indigestion, but I am so glad God inspired folks to improve on it a little.

The authors of One Minute Miracle write a lot about God. The book is actually two books. The right side of each page is the exhortatory text, and the left side of each page is a story about two people who benefit from Chiropractic, better nutrition, and faith in God. But the story has all the worst elements of over-sentimentalized religious fiction. My chief complaint about religion in the West today is that most people's religion is unalloyed sentimentality. I encapsulate it in a statement I've heard often, whenever anything "unpleasant" like sin, hell, repentance, or contrition is mentioned: "Oh, God is so loving! He would never do that!!" Read your Bible, folks: Yes, He would, and the old Spiritual that sings, "Everybody talkin' 'bout heaven; ain't goin' there" is talking about sentimental religionists who are no more heaven-bound than the average doorknob.

So, to be frank, the god these authors tout is not my God. "God" is not a name, it is a title; I prefer to use a direct translation from both Biblical languages, the term "the God." The only Name claimed by the God is the name Jesus: "For there is no other name given among men under heaven by which you must be saved."